Activities/Nutrition

About Nutrition

A series of four nutrition games: Name That Food; How Many Calories?; How Much to Eat?; and Is This a Balanced Meal?

Where to get Nutrition

The Nutrition activity is available for download from the Sugar activity portal: Nutrition

The source code is available on the Sugar Labs Gitorious server.

Using Nutrition

Did you know:

If you get the correct answer, a smiley face is shown.

If you get a wrong answer, the correct answer is shown on a frowny face.

The Toolbars

from left to right
Activity-toolbar Button: (toolbar described below)
Name-that-food Button: Launches a new Name That Food game
How-many-calories Button: Launches a new How Many Calories? game
How-much-should-I-eat Button: Launches a new How Much to Eat? game
Is-this-a-balanced-meal Button: Launches a new Is This a Balanced Meal? game
Stop Button: used to exit the activity

Acitivity Toolbar

Activity name field: used to change the name of the activity (The name is used by the save-to-PDF Button.)
Share Button: disabled (Portfolio Activity does not support sharing)
Reflection Button: used to write descriptions for the Journal entry of this instance of Portfolio

Learning with Nutrition

Each of the nutrition games presents a different learning opportunity.

Name That Food: This game is about literacy, but also provides some nutritional information about the foods as they are presented.

How Many Calories?: This game introduces the concept that different foods have different nutrition value. The focus here is on calories.

How Much to Eat?: This game is based upon the Food Pyramid. It introduces the concept that not all foods should be consumed in equal quantities. E.g., high-sugar-content foods should be eaten in small quantities, while grains and fruits can be eaten in larger quantities.

Is This a Balanced Meal?: This game is also based on the Food Pyramid. It generates meals and asks if they are nutritionally balanced. More cookies and cake than fruit and grains?

Extending Nutrition

Have the children take pictures of the foods that they eat at home. Use the Nutrition acitvity to explore caloric intake and the degree to which they are eating a balanced meal.

Also (not yet implemented) have the children find a food item not in the database and add it using the gear icon. They will need make a picture of the food (using Paint or Record) and look up the nutritional content of their food. (https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/foodapedia.aspx is a good resource.)

Nutrition is a good introduction to some of the concepts explored further in Activities/TurtleArt#Nutrition.

Modifying Nutrition

Add your own foods by adding images to the images directory and adding to the table in game.py

# Food Pyramid
LEVELS = [_('minimum'), _('moderate'), _('most'), _('unlimited')]
# Food name; calories; food pyramid level, image file name
GAME_DEFS = [[_('banana'), 105, 2, 'banana.png'],
             [_('apple'), 72, 2, 'apple.png'],
             [_('fish'), 58, 1, 'fish.png'],
             [_('corn'), 96, 2, 'corn.png'],
             [_('broccoli'), 55, 2, 'broccoli.png'],
             [_('chicken'), 262, 1, 'chicken.png'],
             [_('cheese'), 114, 1, 'cheese.png'],
             [_('orange'), 62, 2, 'orange.png'],
             [_('potato'), 159, 2, 'potato.png'],
             [_('water'), 0, 3, 'water.png'],
             [_('tomato'), 150, 2, 'tomato.png'],
             [_('cookie'), 68, 0, 'cookie.png'],
             [_('beef'), 284, 1, 'beef.png'],
             [_('egg'), 77, 1, 'egg.png'],
             [_('sweetpotato'), 169, 2, 'sweetpotato.png'],
             [_('tamale'), 126, 2, 'nacatamal.png'],
             [_('bread'), 69, 2, 'bread.png'],
             [_('rice and beans'), 411, 2, 'rice-and-beans.png'],
             [_('cake'), 387, 0, 'cake.png']]

Your suggestions for enhancements and/or use cases...

Where to report problems

You can report bugs and make feature requests on our bug-tracking system (You need to create an account first). To list all open tickets of Nutrition you can use query component=Nutrition. You are also welcome to leave comments/suggestions on the Talk:Activities/Nutrition page.

Credits

Nutrition was written and is maintained by User:Walter. He was assisted by Claudia Urrea and Felix Garrido of Fundación Zamora Terán.